


Wayward Souls

by xathira



Series: Prince of the Unknown [12]
Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Beast Wirt, Beatrice is also a Disney Princess, Other, Prince!Wirt AU, Wirt is thirsty for that oil, another OC but this is the last time you'll see her, long journey, monstrous behavior, near death situations but it's probably fine, someone get this boy a Gatorade, terrible puns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-18 03:56:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21654715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/pseuds/xathira
Summary: Wirt has one job.  He does it badly.If not for Beatrice, things would go much,muchworse.
Series: Prince of the Unknown [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1516961
Comments: 41
Kudos: 199





	1. 🙞Come🙜

**Author's Note:**

> Almost forgot: Whiggity wrote a companion to ["Another Beast Born"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21534379) that emotionally crushed me. Read that before you stop here, or dash away to read it after!

Wirt has imagined walking a girl home so many times that he can recite the whole vision like a personal poem. The sun would be dipping into its final moments of setting, a wave’s crest of ruby red and neon pink splashing into an ocean of dark blue; the streetlights would pop on, pools of yellow-orange on the quiet street. If it were summer, crickets and the distant whoosh of cars would provide their ambient noise; in autumn the air would rustle with leaves and the back-and-forth honks of migrating geese; in winter, snow would hush the alleys; in spring there’d be puddles splashed underfoot and the saccharine perfume of blooming magnolias. Wirt would be cool and confident. He’d share witty observations of the season, maybe lilt a few bars of Robert Frost or William Wordsworth, one hand in his pocket and the other free to hold. He’d walk along the sidewalk by the street, like a gentleman should. He wouldn’t stutter or backtrack everything he planned to say. And the girl next to him would be Sara, always Sara, with her welcoming smile and her smart sloe-berry eyes that Wirt has been watching since he knew her in middle school.

The Walk Home would be a moment as romantic and significant as The First Kiss, which could very well happen once Wirt reached the girl’s front door. It was supposed to be perfect. Heartwarming. A story to tell his and Sara’s future children as a bedtime story.

It was _not_ supposed to involve Beatrice physically restraining him while Wirt snarls and thrashes like a wild animal, eyes whirling blue-yellow-pink, _blue-yellow-pink,_ shadows clinging skin-tight to his body, his guttural voice pitching in and out of eldritch dimensions. 

“ _L̿͝ê̊t̿̕ ̇̈g̀̈o̔̓ ͆͗o̍̌f͌ ̾͛m̂̊e̔̃._ ” An order that ricochets off the surrounding trees and makes their twigs rattle. Moonlight skims briefly above the forest canopy before another roll of cobweb-thick fog wraps it up like a spider’s prey. Not that it’s dark within this section of the swamp; the combined hues of Wirt’s irises blaze an eerie white that hurts Beatrice’s vision so much she sees spots behind her eyelids.

“I don’t think so,” the redhead mutters stubbornly. If one didn’t know that she had brothers, the way she’s restraining Wirt would probably clue them in; she’s sitting on his back like an experienced bull rider with her arms tight around Wirt’s gnarled antlers and her knees locked around his arms to stop him from swiping at her. And he _has_ swiped at her. Many times. Apparently he’s forgotten how sharp his wood-carved claws are, or doesn’t care right this second. She grunts when The Beast heaves under her, scrabbling to get upright and failing. “Where are you hiding all this strength in that scrawny body?”

Wirt’s focus has not left a certain point about twenty yards away; he strains toward that spot, the muscles in his neck taut as steel cables, a piteous whimper undercutting the growl that boils in his chest. “N̄̎e̓͐e̔͝d̏̕ ̈́̈i͋̇t̍̽.̎͠ N̷̐͋e̸͋̽ĕ̵͝d̷̊̈́ ̵̔̕h̸̛͊e̴͂̒r̶̓͠.̸̋͆…”

Hidden in the undergrowth, probably scared stiff from the echoing yowls of a monster baying for her death, is the girl that Wirt is _supposed_ to be walking home. She isn’t Sara. Wirt hasn’t enjoyed any sunsets by her side. And “home” for her isn’t simply down the street in a quaint northeastern town. This girl is not supposed to be here in the Unknown—and the arresting otherness of her soul encroaching on Wirt’s domain is driving him absolutely mad with hunger.

He’d thought that the mouthwatering draw of sacrifices was bad. He’d thought nothing would ever tempt him more than the Lantern trapping his soul. Wirt has struggled with endangering the humans around him so often that he still catches himself getting shy around Beatrice’s family—people who are _certainly_ not shy around Wirt—but this is an entire universe away from lusting after common despair or the transient regressions into Beastliness that submerge him when he smells fresh blood. There’s an entire forest’s worth of oil trapped in the stranger’s soul. That untapped potential, ripe for the taking, a _gift_ offered up by fate to sate Wirt’s terrible, terrible ache, and he wants to tell Beatrice that he’ll never need to make another Edelwood again if only he can have this _one_ lost spirit, except Wirt’s having some trouble communicating right now on account of all the demonic sounds ripping from between his teeth—

“Is… um… is he going to be…?” The girl (she told Beatrice to call her “Red,” after Beatrice warned her not to use her real name) peeks out from behind a white oak’s trunk. She’s tugging on her dark ginger ponytail and about tears out a few strands when Wirt sees her face and _howls._ In a blink she ducks back into her temporary hiding place; The Beast feels the fearful drum of her heartbeat pounding through the swamp’s stagnant water and thick mire. “You know what? Nevermind. I can wait.”

“Yeah, you better,” Beatrice calls back with some acid. She spits out a few more curses under her breath as she wrestles with Wirt and Wirt should be able to hear her but he’s buried his talons as far into the earth as he can and is seeking the stranger’s body with voracious roots. Only Beatrice kneeing him in the spine snaps him out of it, and only for a handful of seconds. “Whatever you’re doing, _stop it._ Cut it out, Wirt. Give it up.” Ink-dark roots prickle toward _her_ ankles and calves and she loses the final sliver keeping her temper in line. “I’m going to snap off your antlers and use them as a torch to light our way out of here—is THAT what you want?!”

It isn’t the threat that makes Wirt blink, listening to his own ragged breath for the first time since he plunged into this fit; the quaver in Beatrice’s tone, _her_ fear tinging the humid air, hits Wirt like a bucket of ice water. The taut aggression in his body unravels. He realizes that mud smears the entire front half of his body and Beatrice is practically sitting on his shoulders. “B-Beatrice?” he asks hoarsely. The colors in his eyes stabilize. Blackness bleeds from him until his silhouette is normal night-dark and he isn’t a living void. “Why am I on the ground?”

Beatrice exhales shakily. Instead of answering him, she grinds her knuckles into his scalp until Wirt yelps. The Beast swears he hears her sniffle, wiping her nose on the back of her arm, but when she shouts to Red cowering out there in the moss the tremble has left her throat. “We’re good. He’s back. Are you up for more hiking tonight?”

The stranger jumps to her feet, jittery, wiping dirt off her hands and pulling her boots from the squelch of the ground. “Absolutely. I’d like to cover as much ground as we can before your bud goes crazy again, thank you very much.”


	2. 🙞Wayward🙜

Two weeks prior to Wirt and Beatrice attempting to shepherd an intruder out of the Unknown, Beatrice notices a pattern of behavior in her skittish, melancholy friend that raises a few questions. These questions build their nest in her head unbeknownst to her siblings, who don’t seem to track Wirt as closely as she does. 

They’ve accepted that their Beast is an odd one. They don’t prod too deeply when their antlered brother suddenly excuses himself and fades into the forest with no explanation, as long as he eventually returns. If Wirt is quiet for a while… sometimes for as long as an entire day… Beatrice’s older brothers and sisters order the younger ones to give him space while encouraging Beatrice to step in. Everyone assumes that Wirt’s occasional vanishing is simply part of his duty as a nature spirit. Edelwood is never mentioned. Nobody dares to pry into the painful burdens Wirt must carry alone. The family has formed a silent agreement that the details of Wirt’s Beastliness is taboo—and that means, much to Beatrice’s frustration, that she can’t simply confront Wirt about what keeps her up at night.

Actually, she _can._ But there’s no tactful sort of confrontation.

“How do you travel so quickly?” she asks him abruptly one lazy afternoon. They’re foraging in the woods behind the house, behind the green field of corn that has no business growing so tall in the springtime. Beatrice grips her basket, heavy with chickweed, clover, and wild violets; Wirt is pulling up a few more flowers he _swears_ are edible. Usually Beatrice savors these moments she can spend with him alone, peacefully walking the property without her brothers and sisters screeching for attention… it’s just, she can’t ignore how she watched him follow Andrew and Bram to check the traps that morning, only to beat them back to the house an hour before they should have returned and acting distracted (“Oh, are they still out there? S-sorry, I got… sidetracked?”) 

Wirt’s ears flush the same color as the wild rose his talons are cupping. “Er… fast hooves?”

“Har, har,” Beatrice responds without humor. “You know what I mean. How you disappear and reappear somewhere else… like a magician pulling a Beast out of a hat.”

His shoulders shrug under his cloak. He avoids her eyes, but Beatrice can tell that he’s just _embarrassed,_ not mistrustful or sullen. “It’s sort of a thing I can do, I guess. I… I melt into the Unknown. Like sugar dissolving in tea, if that makes any sense. I pour myself in, and then I’m everywhere all at once, and if I concentrate, I can… become sugar again?” His brows knit together and he bites the inside of his cheek, that blush spreading down the back of his neck. “No, that sounds stupid. Ugh. So I can teleport, right? But I have to literally become the forest to do that—”

Beatrice waves him off. “Uh-huh, got it. You’re sugar. The Unknown is tea. Crystal clear.”

“It wasn’t s-supposed to be a s-secret,” Wirt stammers. “I didn’t like… w-want to _hide_ it from anyb-body, I’m just… it’s so _weird_ a-a-and… not… _n-normal._ ”

And Beatrice instantly feels like a jerk. _Oh, right,_ she thinks bitterly to herself. _We agreed not to prod specifically to avoid making him feel uncomfortable about himself. Nice going._

“It’s normal for _you,_ ” Beatrice says, a little too brightly. She reaches out to tuck a small purple flower in the crook between two of Wirt’s antler tines. “Don’t get all wilting violet on me.” 

Wirt’s lips move to protest. Then his pink-ringed eyes narrow, and he glances at Beatrice fully, plucking off the purple bud to point at her accusingly. “Beatrice… d-did you just make a pun? A _bad_ pun?” 

She twirls her basket innocently. “I don’t do puns. That’s _your_ nerdy poet thing. Now, we should probably take these to the kitchen before my mom thinks we’re out here fiddling around.” And she quickly sticks a tightly curled fiddlehead in the same crook she’d placed the violet. 

Wirt’s disgust outweighs his self-consciousness and he stands upright, already marching to the mill. “I’m _begging_ you, no more. Please.”

“Believe it or not, this is infinitely more painful for me than it is for you. So let’s go, sugarcube.”

“You CANNOT call me that in front of your family!”

The next morning, Beatrice brings up Wirt’s teleportation ability to her family over breakfast, framing it as an incredible skill that she wants to brag about. Wirt, leaning in from the open window as he always does, flushes red and gapes at her as if she’s betrayed him… yet Calvin is the next person to mention that he’s always wondered how Wirt can be so sneaky, and Dorian insists that _this_ is what he was talking about when he said he saw Wirt turn into a tree that one time, and then Beatrice is pushing Wirt to “tell them what you told me about the tea,” and over a plate of eggs and toast Wirt haltingly explains another one of his Beast Things. 

It’s obvious that even _he_ doesn’t completely understand the limits of his “dissolving,” nor precisely how it works. Nevertheless, Beatrice’s siblings conclude that Wirt’s powers give him an unfair advantage during Hide and Seek, so they’ll have to figure out a handicap for him the next time they play. 

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

The fact that Wirt can sink into the forest at will (or mostly at will, if he’s in control of his emotions) answers one of Beatrice’s questions. She sweats through a few nightmares of losing her friend to the Unknown—Wirt falling past her hands into the unreachable darkness, Wirt’s cries for help muffled from within bark, Wirt collapsing into the ground before her eyes—and she figures she deserves that, for prying. That doesn’t stop her from watching Wirt even closer, stomach swooping when he slips through the lilacs and reappears through the goldenrod, the bruises under his eyes a shade deeper. 

Beatrice’s mother and father don’t interrogate Wirt about where he goes, not like they would if Beatrice went missing for more than a few hours. Her brothers and sisters brush off Wirt’s solo adventures as something he “does,” like how Rusty chases his own tail or darts after every single squirrel he sees. Beatrice knows she should probably adopt the same accepting attitude. It’s none of her business. Wirt leaves, he comes _home._ He gets sad, but he still talks to her, talks to Andrew and Audrey and the little kids like he’s one of them. It shouldn’t matter that Wirt sleeps outside (when he sleeps at all), or that he lives this entire secret life that Beatrice can’t even imagine.

It does matter, though. The fiery redhead can’t stand how Wirt is part of her family and yet fundamentally alone. And it infuriates her that she seems to be the only person who isn’t satisfied with the status quo. She counts the minutes and hours between Wirt’s vanishings and worries herself into a fever, her nerves frayed, irritable as a hornet until she sees his jagged antlers or hears the concern in his anxious voice. “I wasn’t gone too long this time, was I?” 

She should be out there with him. That conviction sits like a coal in her guts, charring a pit behind her navel. Maybe Wirt is busy tending gardens or guiding travelers or growing Edelwood but Beatrice needs to be present. She can help him, whether she’s sharing his burden or offering a listening ear.

Beatrice knows what it’s like to be surrounded by loved ones and still be isolated. She’s felt things fester in her chest until it was easier to run away than to face the people who saw her every day.

It’s great that Wirt told her how he disappears. Now to kill her other curiosities.

“Where’d you go this time?”

Her covert whisper has Wirt leaping a foot into the air. His eyes are two wide blue stars lighting up the night and Beatrice’s impatient expression as she frowns at him from one of the Adirondak chairs positioned out front. Wirt falls against the house and slides to land on his rump, one talon clutching his chest. “What are you still doing awake?” he shoots back. “You’re not… are you feeling well?”

“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?” Beatrice doesn’t mention that she’s the only one of her family who hadn’t felt the pre-rain chill in the air for the heat of her skin, or that she had to sit to knead bread dough because standing for too long left her lightheaded. 

“I wasn’t gone that long,” Wirt replies, mostly to himself. He gazes absently at the river, its current turned pearl-white from the moon’s glow. “There’s a town called Appleonia to the east. You’ll never guess what their main export is...”

“What were you doing there?” Beatrice coughs into her fist—but it’s only a tiny cough, more to clear her throat than her lungs, which don’t feel as heavy as they did a while ago.

The wood-faun boy sighs. “It’s late. You should be in bed, or you’re going to feel worse. Do your parents know that you’re up?”

“I’m fine.” And, to her surprise, that isn’t a total lie. The evening air is cool and perfumed by the long-blooming flowers and the live coal in her abdomen settles into a less-sickening ember. 

“You’re not fine,” Wirt murmurs, stare dropping to his lap. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his bark-carved hands, whipped and ready for bed himself, and Beatrice hears him mumble “What am I going to do?” several times under his breath. The young woman sets her jaw and stalks over to him; if she can’t make her demands now, then when?

The Beast seizes up when Beatrice settles down next to him, as is usual with him when somebody draws too close. Suspicion, or apprehension, tightens the corners of his mouth. “I should start tagging along on some of these outings,” Beatrice begins—and hushes him with a light punch in the arm when Wirt races to object. “Shut up. I want to go with you next time. If it’s a trip I can make in a day, you should take me with you. I bet Mom and Dad would be fine with it. Or, if they aren’t… we’ll just say that we’re foraging. They’d believe that excuse easily enough.”

Her pulse, which had jumped and fluttered while Wirt was busy all day, speeds once more while she watches the boy think. He’s always been nakedly expressive, heart beating right on his sleeve, and Beatrice knows she’s won before Wirt parts his tensely pursed lips. “Y-yeah. If I’m not… if I don’t have to… if it’s just a n-nice visit, I can bring you along, I suppose.”

So Beatrice has to hug him, despite how he sputters and struggles and insists she needs to go upstairs before someone catches her outside.

The following night, an hour or two after the family has all gone to sleep, Beatrice bribes Rusty with a treat and sneaks out the back door, where she’s greeted by _two_ pairs of antlers. There’s Wirt, with a whip-poor-will perched comfortably on an outer tine… and next to him stands a magnificent stag, its rack soft with velvet, flicking its tail as it scents her. Beatrice’s huge eyes spark a grin in Wirt that tempers all the nervous energy stringing his body.

“We’ll make this quick,” he warns. “I don’t want your sisters m-murdering me if they find you gone.”

“I wrote a note,” Beatrice breathes. She knew animals liked Wirt. She’s seen them follow him home. But a mature stag has never traveled this close to her house, imposing and regal with a crown that dwarf Wirt’s. “Um… what is your friend doing here?”

Wirt pats the deer’s neck as if it’s a tame pony. Beatrice will be damned if he doesn’t look a little _smug._ “This is your ride. You have to keep up somehow.”


	3. 🙞Souls🙜

The first sign that things won’t go well with Wirt’s rescue mission occurs when Wirt first senses his prey—no, _not prey,_ because she isn’t hopeless, at least not at first. Wirt and Beatrice are at a vineyard in the middle of the night, sewing a little kindness for a family that Wirt has taken a liking to; Wirt passes back and forth across the tidy rows of growing grapes while Beatrice keeps a lookout. They’ve tried to make short trips during the day, crafting excuses as best they can, but Ma’am and Sir grow nervous when Beatrice is out for too long. Wirt disappearing they can handle. If it’s their Beatrice? That’s an issue.

“It’s only them being clingy on account of me flying the coop during the bluebird curse fiasco—pun intended.” Beatrice reassures Wirt more than once, whenever he starts getting cold feet (hooves?) before stealthing away from the mill while the family sleeps none the wiser. “What do they think is going to happen to me? The Beast is the most dangerous thing in the Unknown, everybody knows that. Nothing is going to mess with me when I’m with you.”

She doesn’t understand that what she’s telling him is literally the problem. Wirt _is_ the most dangerous thing in the Unknown. And Beatrice is volunteering—no, _insisting_ on traveling alone with him, after the sun sets, to destinations her parents know nothing about. She forgets, or ignores, the times that Wirt accidentally reveals facets of himself that are less than safely human. Maybe she’s too glad that she finally knows where Wirt travels when he vanishes from sight, and what he’s doing when he goes. 

Beatrice can’t ignore what happens in the vineyard. 

“It’s cute that you do this,” the redhead teases him in a low voice, eyes trained on the compact house at the bottom of the gently sloping hill. “Visiting orchards and vegetable gardens just to be nice. You darn softie. What did these people do to earn The Beast’s favor?”

Wirt deftly tugs his claws away from a snare of vines that have curled coquettishly around his knuckles. “They’re kind to animals,” he answers. He keeps _his_ eyes on his task; he trusts Beatrice to warn him if she notices anyone stirring from the house, and he also admits (grudgingly, inwardly, secretly) that the sight of his friend with her loose russet curls glistening under the moon is intensely distracting. The plants adore his poetry but Wirt will hurtle headfirst into nothingness if Beatrice ever hears him accidentally mutter the verses that comes to him from that imagery alone. 

“Imagine how much kinder they’d be if they knew a benevolent Beast was watching over them. I’m sure if you reveal yourself the right way, at the right time, people would come to trust you.” Beatrice glances at him quickly, quirking a brow. “You wouldn’t have to creep around in secret. Maybe you’d garner a cult following.”

Predictably, Wirt blushes at her playful fun-poking. Darkness distills everything into shades of grey, however, and he’s off the hook. “I’ve thought about it, sure. That’s probably exactly what I would have done in the past. But that’s… selfish.” More vines grasp at his hands. They’re greener, spryer, than when he’d first meandered by their trellis. “Good deeds mean more if you do them because they’re right. Not for credit.”

Greg wouldn’t be too proud of his brother if Wirt only helped others for the promise of a reward. 

“Oh, you’re no fun,” Beatrice grouses. She crosses her arms under her shawl. “I’m not saying that you have to ask for a parade. You’re a different Beast than what the Unknown is expecting, though. My family shouldn’t be the only ones that… Wirt? Hey, Wirt, what’s happening?”

Her voice is one hundred miles away. So is the vineyard, the grassy hill and the young vines, the little house and all the people slumbering inside. They are background noise. Inconsequential. The whole of Wirt’s awareness—what he sees, what he hears, what he smells beckoning him forward—wrenches at him from a distant part of the forest, a scene painted by floating duckweed and spider lilies and cypress trees overlaid upon his current surroundings like film upon a projector. A call as strong as that of the Lantern. An invitation whose temptation puts most sacrifices to shame. A white-hot railroad spike of _need_ speared through his caving-in stomach. His eyes flash three different hues and saliva floods his mouth and a liquid rumble thunders behind his breastbone and he leaps like a panther from one place to another in the chirp of a cricket, the silent swoosh of an owl’s wing.

This swamp is somewhere Wirt has never been to. And the girl spinning toward him, jaw dropping in shock, frame shifting into a sloppy fighting stance, has never been in the Unknown at _all._ That’s clear in her form of dress—a modern hoodie over a skirt and some leggings—and from the raw, bewildered brand of terror that seeps from her pores, a terror different from the dread of recognition that citizens of this world would face The Beast with. Granted, Wirt has no way of knowing how timelines or realities intersect in the Unknown. His impossible, fairytale domain is one of savage ghosts and fanciful talking animals. If he and Greg had come here on accident, then surely travelers from other universes can _also_ find their way beyond the veil. 

She’s fresh meat. Her soul is forbidden ambrosia. It is a beacon when every other soul he’s come across is a mere candle’s flame. Wirt’s voice is not his own as he extends a talon toward her, expression falsely polite and utterly starving. “Hello, there,” he soothes in a tone that conceals a blade beneath its silk. “You’re lost, aren’t you? All alone, her̬̚e͖̅ ̈ͅi̼͗n̝͐ ̹̋t̳͂h͛͜e̙͝ ̙͗Ǔ̞ñ͎k̡̆n̲̕o͓͑ẅ͓n͈̈́?” 

The girl’s inhales and exhales jump too erratically for her to scream. She swallows and the sound of her throat is wet sand compacting. “Wha-what… what _are_ you?”

Wirt bleaches her face with spectral light. Edelwood roots scrabble at the earth under the girl’s boots like something trying to escape its grave. Jet-black shadows dress The Beast from head to hoof and darkness pulsates throughout the swamp until even the flicker of fireflies dies. Something reaches up through Wirt’s guts and moves his jaw as if he’s no more than an empty puppet. 

“T̨̰̽͆h̎̚͜ͅe͓͇̽̅ ̧̡̉̌B̭̬̚͠e̺̦̓̂ȧ̻̞͘s̻̫̾͆t͔̘͆͘.͈̟̒”

Edelwood rears up from the mire in horrid skeletal shapes, ravenous, lashing toward the girl—and then a supernova of heat blasts Wirt from another place, _the vineyard,_ and the seeking roots freeze brittle in place to let the girl flee and Wirt is keeling over, groaning, and oh no he’s too far from Beatrice he went _way too far—_

His friend is right where he abandoned her, collapsed, one hand gripping the trellis to hold herself somewhat upright. “Beatrice,” Wirt says, hushed and distressed. He kneels before her, taking her face tenderly in his hands.

Beatrice hyperventilates, her flesh scalding, limbs trembling with fatigue. “You left me here.” Her voice cracks. The drying wetness on her face might be tears, or it might be perspiration, or both, and Wirt isn’t going to ask. “What the hell, Wirt? Why’d you d-ditch me, you _ass,_ and wh-why do I feel so…?”

“I did, I’m sorry, I am, I don’t know.” He scoops her bridal style into his arms, carefully, anxiously, swealtering from this proximity to her fever-heat. Back at the swamp, the stranger’s existence harpoons itself into his brain and won’t let go. He needs to take Beatrice home _he wants to devour the stranger_ he wants to ensure Beatrice will be okay _he needs to lock the stranger in Edelwood and burn her alive to light the Lantern—_

Wirt clicks his tongue, and the same stag that brought Beatrice here—who has taken her to all the places too distant to walk—springs from where it had been grazing at the base of the hill. It stands steadfast while Wirt drapes Beatrice over its back, her arms weakly wrapping about its strong neck in a now practiced embrace. “We’re going home,” Wirt promises. He bites his lip until obsidian blood wells over his tongue. Speaking normally requires wrestling Beastly lyrics deep down under his diaphragm, where they roil and scrape like the Edelwood even now trying to clutch at the girl in the swamp. “I’ll get you back in bed. You just need to r-rest, that’s all. It’ll be okay.” 

The buck bolts as fast as it can toward the mill, mindful of Beatrice’s weakened state. Wirt lifts her from the loyal deer and carries her through the front door, up the stairs, and into her bedroom, mentally sending prayers of gratitude that the steps don’t creak and no one wakes up to the beam of his irises spilling over their quilts. Even Rusty offers no more than a soft “woof” at seeing Wirt, pushing his cold nose into Beatrice’s face when Wirt removes her shoes and tucks her in. She’s unconscious before Wirt is out of the room.

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

Bram is up first, rising with the dawn to find Wirt sitting cross-legged outside the girls’ bedroom, resting against the wall. “Do I need to ask what you’re doing inside?” he asks, impassive.

Wirt stares blankly at the opposite wall. He shrugs. 

Bram steps over him without another word and trudges downstairs for a glass of water.

Beatrice’s fever resolves itself by the time the rest of the family has opened their eyes. Through the door, Wirt hears her tell her sisters that she’s wearing her shawl because she got too cold last night (“Odd,” mentions Audrey, “you were burning up not two days ago”) and soon all the young ladies of the house are passing Wirt on their way to breakfast. Little Florence pats him sleepily on the head. Audrey and Cordelia shoot him quizzical looks, but leave him be. 

Beatrice is the last to exit the bedroom. She doesn’t so much as glance at Wirt. And that’s one thousand times worse than any curses or physical abuse that Wirt assuredly deserves.


	4. 🙞Who🙜

It’s midday when Beatrice approaches the stranger astride her buck, poised and regal despite the bags under her eyes and the dirt of travel dusting the hem of her skirt and her travelpack. She’s managed to pile all her hair into a tight twist with her bangs sweeping across her brow. Beatrice’s civilized human appearance helps put the tense, haggard other girl at ease… and, yeah, the fact that Beatrice is riding a _stag_ definitely makes her appear trustworthy—if not incredibly impressive.

“You’re lost, huh?” Beatrice addresses the other redhead without preamble. She waits through a serenade of bullfrogs belting out from the lilypads, shaded by the curtain of moss dripping off an ancient bough arching above her. Privately, she thinks that this girl’s getup is almost as terrible as Wirt’s had been when she first met him; at least that idiot hadn’t been wrong about the stranger not belonging here.

The other girl shuts her mouth, which had fallen open upon watching Beatrice and her buck trot around the reeds. “I… yeah, I am. Not sure where I’m supposed to go from here… I don’t _think_ I was in a swamp before…” She attempts to bat the astonishment from her wide eyes. “Sorry… are you riding a deer? How did you get it to let you do that?”

Beatrice pinches the bridge of her nose to fend off an oncoming headache. “Let’s just get you home, all right? I know someone who can guide you to where you want to go. _Allegedly._ ” She directs this scathing word to the clustered trees behind the stranger, who peers perplexedly over her shoulder and pulls on one of the strings that dangles from the hood of her ugly sweater. 

“So… your friend can take me home?” The stranger eagerly looks to Beatrice after a heartbeat and her eyes shine with prematurely grateful tears. “W-what do I have to do? Do they expect something in return? I’ll do it. I’ll do anything.”

“Watch what you say,” Beatrice tells the other girl bluntly, nudging her buck to start walking forward. “Your words might get twisted if you’re not careful. I know from experience.”

“Got it. My name’s—”

“Not interested. Probably not a good idea to share that.” 

The stranger struggles to keep pace with Beatrice and her deer physically, and to keep up with Beatrice’s biting lack of hospitality mentally. She gives that away with the irritation crossing her features, though she’s too desperate to retaliate. “Okay… you can call me Red, then. And you are?”

Beatrice sears her with a withering impatient stare until the other ginger lass averts her eyes and pulls her hood over her hair. “Fine, fine. Be mysterious. B-but… there _is_ a way out. Right?” 

Beatrice sighs and nods, glancing furtively at the shadows where she last saw Wirt. “Yes. There’s a way out.”

Shaky, relieved laughter makes the other girl’s rigid posture relax. She jogs to catch up to the deer and slaps one hand onto its tawny shoulder—oblivious to Beatrice stiffening and squinting like a cat about to bite the head off a mouse. “Oh, thank _god._ I totally thought I was screwed. I am _definitely_ not supposed to be here.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah… where do we go from here?”

“Just follow along,” Beatrice snaps back a bit too loudly. She points to the overgrown weeds and cattails she’d sneered at earlier, nose wrinkling as if she smells something repugnant. “It’s _his_ job to show us.”

And to her credit, Red doesn't pass out when Wirt pokes his head out from his hiding place, antlers and glowing eyes and robed in onyx, sheepishly waving as if he hadn’t tried to choke her with Edelwood not two days before.

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

A vast river that could almost be considered a long, winding lake has flooded this section of the forest with its overspill, creating wetlands of towering trees and pools of water dark as espresso and curdled with algae. Closer to the river, tributaries flow calmly enough to allow ferries to float down the current, transporting finely dressed passengers: frogs, herons, and otters whose merry bands send music booming distantly into the atmosphere. It’d be nice if Red could hop aboard and hitch a ride toward home… but the zone Wirt instinctively knows he has to bring her to only skims the edges of these ferry routes.

Besides, the trio has no money. Sneaking aboard hadn’t gone all that well the last time Wirt tried.

The plan is: Wirt will lead the way through the swamp, scouting for danger, and Beatrice will linger behind no less than fifteen yards with Red. A plan supposedly straightforward enough that Wirt cannot possibly mess it up… which is imperative, because he’s probably destroyed things irrevocably between himself and Beatrice _and_ Beatrice’s family. There’s an “I told you so” tied near his tonsils that he can’t tell his friend; it’s Wirt’s fault that Beatrice has to be here at all.

“How do you two know each other?” Red’s awkward attempts to spark a conversation with tacit, furious Beatrice usually die out quickly, but that hasn’t stopped her yet. “I think he tried to kill me when we first met, so… are you guys like acquaintances, or…?”

Beatrice keeps her glare fixed at a point beyond her buck’s antlers. Every so often, the twin globes of Wirt’s eyes meet hers through the bracken and the shade, smoldering brighter as the sun sets in the terra-cotta sky. Red gasps or shrinks back each time The Beast reveals himself ahead; Beatrice just squares her shoulders, as if she’s daring him to do something dumb. “He kidnapped me.”

“K-kidnapped you?” Horror flares and it’s something Wirt can _taste,_ a burned-sugar aroma on the tip of his tongue. “Then… then why should I trust you?”

“Little late to be asking that, dontcha think?” Beatrice hisses. The stag tosses its head as if in agreement. “Look, as long as I’m here, you’ll be fine. He knows I’ll kick his ass if he attacks you again. When he’s not… when he’s not acting _crazy,_ he’s actually…” There’s still plenty of bitterness in her voice to make Wirt’s mouth pucker, though what she says next has his heart melting. “He’s actually very sweet.”

The Beast droops a little lower in the blackness he’s concealed himself within. He doesn’t feel sweet. He feels like selfish traitor with zero impulse control. 

“I guess I have no choice but to believe you,” assents Red, “seeing as my other choice is to wander around until I starve to death. Do _you_ trust him?” The hopefulness glinting in the stranger’s voice makes Wirt’s empty stomach heave. He has to bite the inside of his cheek hard enough to bleed, hard enough for the hurt to distract him from his unrelenting hunger pangs, so he can focus on what he has to do, on each placement of his hooves in slippery mud or rot-softened logs. Guardians don’t pounce on vulnerable people like starved wolverines. _We’re here to protect her, we’re going to HELP not hunt help not hunt she’s not for us we’re not supposed to—_

“Yes,” Beatrice answers. And Wirt pauses to hide his face in his hands to muffle out a sob, knowing well that the two girls can’t hear him from that far away.

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

Beatrice writes a letter to her family when Red needs to stop for the night, scribbling out a short message on a piece of paper that she hands off to a nightjar; Wirt sends the bird back to the mill, hoping and praying and crossing his talons that the wide-mouthed bird will remember the path he described.

Wirt keeps himself separated from Red and Beatrice as he asks a willow to provide them shelter for the evening. The tree’s rustling vine-like branches, full as a ballgown, offer respite from the elements. Wirt’s eyes spearing like beacons into the twilight keep away any curious predators. He’s climbed into the higher boughs of a cottonwood himself, where he can stare across the glimmering expanse of the wetlands toward the “opening” in the Unknown that thrums along the same resonance as Red’s alien novelness. 

The Beast does not question his instinct. It’s almost as if a door exists that is the same shape as the stranger, waiting for her, and _only_ for her, and no one else. If they maintain their pace, if Wirt _maintains control,_ they’ll have Red home in three days, tops. Which means Beatrice can be home in about a week. 

Easier said than done. His limbs tremble minutely with the desire to climb down the cottonwood’s trunk and rip the stranger from where she’s sleeping restlessly next to Beatrice, Edelwood slithering below the surface of the swamp and all that the trap requires to spring is Wirt’s command—

The snap of wings overhead draws Wirt’s attention from Red’s remote exit to the branches creaking just above him. A lone raven cuts out a black shape against the glittering starry sky. It preens its breast feathers and then peers down at Wirt with eyes that gleam like stars themselves.

 _If I were to take her,_ Wirt thinks, gripped in the raven’s glow, _the Edelwood she’d make would sustain us for years._

Red screeches as Wirt yanks her by her ankles out from under the willow, away from the bed of moss that had grown for her comfort and away from Beatrice’s startled, grasping hands. The stag, standing guard, flees into the night with a frightened bugle. 

Wirt is deaf to Red’s unhinged screaming. Her legs kicking at insatiable Edelwood and her cries for help, for mercy, do not move him. He shudders in ecstatic hunger when a root whips against her upper arm and tears through her sleeve to draw a thin line of blood, perfect and beautifully red, warm as her beating heart. She will blaze for generations. A single drop of her will spark vitality through The Beast such as he has never enjoyed before… but he won’t satisfy himself with a mere _drop,_ no, he’s not sure it’d be possible to consume this soul with any modicum of restraint. “Be s͈̅t̨͊ī̮l̑͜l.” He curls his fist and the Edelwood mirrors the inward clench of his claws. His ears ring with Red’s shrieks, with Beatrice’s panic-stricken bellowing, or maybe that’s just the echo of a raven’s croak swaying in the trees.

An unholy noise of rage explodes from his chest when Beatrice tackles him to the ground. 

“ _What do you think you’re doing?!_ ” she shouts in his face. Several drops of something tepid and wet and saline hit his forehead, his upper lip, the spot between his eyes. She’s fisted his shirt in her hands and knocks him against the earth. Hard. “Wake up, you idiot!” Her freckles are spotlighted by ice-blue, fever-pink, sulfur-yellow. Wirt rattles out something too deep to be a growl… and Beatrice inhales sharply before backhanding him across the face with all her strength. 

“Ow!” A broken yelp, and Wirt swivels to gawk up at his friend straddling his chest. He cups his ruddy cheek with a whorled palm. “What w-was that for? What did I do?”

Beatrice scoots off of him as quickly as she can, turning her shoulder toward him so he can’t see her face. She holds her hand out to a hiccuping, shivering Red, who accepts the help without hesitation. 

“That’s not supposed to happen,” Beatrice falters, checking Red over for injuries. Then she takes in Wirt as if she’s never seen him before. “Edelwood isn’t… it’s not supposed to grow unless you’ve given up hope, or died in the woods.”

“Then what the hell was that?!” Red yells back, wiping tears from her cheekbones. “How come I have to rely on some monster that wants to _eat me—_ ”

Now Beatrice slaps Red, and Wirt winces in sympathy. “You freaking out is only going to make it worse. Get a grip. Do you see him trying to eat you _now?_ ”

She gestures harshly at Wirt, who hunches in on himself like a dying plant and averts his gaze apologetically. Beatrice stands over Red as if the other girl is a sibling who’s stepped out of line, fists clenched and face carved into a mask of pure danger. “Bitching and moaning and losing your damn mind makes my job harder. Understand?” Red nods once, reluctantly, and when Beatrice steps forward and tosses her supply bag at Red’s feet she immediately submits. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and carry my stuff, so I can focus on The Beast? Oh—and _that’s_ what you call him. ‘The Beast.’ The only person who gets to call him a monster is _me._ ”

It takes more than a minute for the usual nighttime sounds to resume while Red shucks on Beatrice’s pack and Beatrice reties her boots. There’s no way anyone is sleeping any more tonight. Once crickets and frogs and hooting owls strike up their symphony, Wirt marches onward, searching the trees for the wink of a bird’s starry eyes and sick with the certainty that this isn’t the last time he’ll do something so reckless.


	5. 🙞Wander🙜

Turns out Wirt is right on the screwing up front. He’s never wished so fervently to be wrong.

“We have to help her,” Wirt had begged Beatrice the night after he stranded her in the vineyard. “She’s like Greg and I… she’s _lost._ She’s not supposed to be in the Unknown. If I don’t get her out…”

They both remember Greg, Edelwood growing into his veins and leaves unfurling past his teeth. Greg, who the first Beast had taken instead of Wirt. And Wirt still thinks about the faces he’s encased in smoky bark, despair immortalized in wood and root and oil, and _that’s_ the fate that awaits the stranger if left to succumb to hopelessness all alone. 

(The possibility thrills him, and nauseates him, makes his jaws tighten with the urge to bite and his heart hurt.)

“What’s this ‘we’ about?” Beatrice had stabbed back, a wobble in her words. “You were pretty happy to abandon me to find this random traveler all on your own.”

They sat outside, in Wirt’s spot by the waterwheel, hoping the steady splash of the river and groan of the wheel’s gears would hide their conversation should anyone wake up. “I can’t.” Wirt had spoken so carefully, so gently, as if Beatrice were made of glass and the wrong syllable would shatter her. “You… you know that. I can’t travel too far from you, or for too long, or…”

“Or I get ill.” Beatrice, Wirt doesn’t realize, is already cracked, and she had wanted to grind those sharp edges into him until he could appreciate her pain. Which is stupid, and pointless, because Wirt is already in pain all the time and Beatrice _knows_ being mean won’t solve anything. “Yep. Figured that out on my own. I’m not stupid.”

“I never said that,” Wirt had told her, reaching for her hand. “Beatrice, I’d never think—”

“Never mind. I get it. You have to help her.” She’d rubbed her eyes as if that would stop her from crying like a disappointed, frustrated toddler. “Guess we can figure out whatever curse this is later, huh?”

They’d waited there, listening to the river and the insects. Ma’am and Sir would never give their permission for Beatrice to follow Wirt. And they also wouldn’t understand that Wirt couldn’t just stay at the mill and ignore a plight he wants to take responsibility for. That meant there was only one option.

At least Beatrice had left another note before grabbing her travelsack. Maybe that would be enough to stop her nine siblings from storming the Unknown to bring her back.

🙞 ------------------------- 🙜

Point A to Point B. Red is the object that doesn’t belong, and it’s his duty as the sole creature who knows the Unknown _best_ to see her home. Except he messes up over and over, _and over,_ losing his mind to the draw of her life-force like a drug addict desperately seeking a more potent high. Guilt brands his face and rakes its way down his neck and into his intestines. Wirt has one job— _one job_ —and if he weren’t a slavering monster it would have been over and done with already.

The young Beast shepherds them through serene paths bedazzled with lightning bugs and fragrant with lilies and loosestrife buds. He’s always just far enough ahead to disappear around corners, maintaining a necessary separation; Wirt requires a few seconds after so many strides to breathe, concentrate, _breathe,_ panting like an overheated wolf as he reminds himself that he _does not want_ to kill this stranger, does not need her soul to dissolve into oil, even though the exotic import of her spirit is like a delicacy he might never have the chance to taste again. There is such _potential_ in her… a ripe flavor of energy that will burn differently than those souls born here in the Unknown, who are _supposed_ to be here. 

Red is a living trolley problem: one life in exchange for many more native souls he could save instead. An instance of schadenfreude he could turn into a blessing for himself and incentive to keep citizens of the Unknown protected. 

Or…

Or Wirt can keep his word. He can lead the girl out of here like he promised himself and Beatrice. And he’ll _still_ search for a path where he doesn’t have to treat the human beings of his kingdom like fodder.

He won’t do to this girl what the original Beast almost did to him and Greg.

“How much longer?” the girl asks tremulously. She and Beatrice are about twenty yards behind their guide. Hopelessness circles her like a scavenger.

“Stop asking,” Beatrice mutters. Her boots scrape and slip over the terrain. “We’ll get there when we get there.”

Wirt feels the vibration of Red’s “door” about five miles ahead… and then he feels a pair of avian eyes skewering him, and he leads them in a long meandering circle that Beatrice only catches because she recognizes a root she tripped over more than one time. A well-aimed stone to the chest reorients Wirt to his duty.

He shouldn’t have invited Beatrice. He didn’t really have much of a choice, given how far away Red appeared in the Unknown, _much_ farther than Wirt felt comfortable traveling away from his friend for more than twenty-four hours… but he’s slipped up in front of Beatrice too many times to forgive, and Wirt feels their friendship crumbling through his hands like clods of dirt the longer he keeps her away from her family. This is precisely what he was afraid of. This is one of his worst nightmares shaped into reality. Wirt tries so, _so_ hard to be decent, to prove he isn’t The Beast he usurped, and it turns out that he’s just as bad.

No. He’s _worse._ The Beast that stalked him and Greg had been a persistence hunter, biding his time and exhausting the brothers’ hope until Wirt gave himself up to the forest. Perhaps that ancient Beast’s power had diminished with age… or perhaps the original King had been so sure of himself, so comfortable and confident in his tactics, his hunger tempered by eons of experience, that he could control his covetous impulses. Wirt, by comparison, is an overeager pup frantic to make his kill.

Beatrice has to take him by the shoulders and shake him when Wirt stops walking midway over a moss-carpeted log that spans a stagnant pond. He’s growling to himself, mumbling ugly things in a one-sided conversation. “Wirt. Wake up.” It’s a wonder he keeps his hooves under him, with how hard she’s rattling his teeth. “We’re still on the right track, aren’t we? You’re not taking us in circles again?”

The triple-rings of Wirt’s eyes reflect eerily over the still, filmy water, brighter than the sunset spilling over the swamp. A sunset that should have marked him and Beatrice returning to the mill. 

He stares at Beatrice without seeing her. Circles, yes… he’d been hoping to wear down the stranger until she has to rest, too weary to fight the grasp of Edelwood striving to entrap her. Finest oil. Purest fuel. 

“I don’t _think_ we’ve gone over this log before,” Red offers uncertainly, five yards behind. Wirt’s stare snaps straight at her—he shows his teeth—and Beatrice digs her fingers into his upper arms and _shoves_ him over the fallen tree and into the pond with a flailing splash. 

When Wirt resurfaces, spurting sediment-thick water and duckweed tangled in his antlers, Beatrice grimaces and shrugs. “Sorry,” she tells him, not sounding sorry. 

Red stuffs her hands in the front pocket of her hoodie. The smell of her old fear misces with the mud-and-brine, rot-and-lily cologne hung molasses-thick all around them. It would distract Wirt all over again if not for the water dripping off his nose and soaking every last inch of him. “An-nother hour,” he vows. Humiliation weighs him down and Wirt would love to just… sink into the swamp and drown. 

He can last another hour. One more hour, no mistakes, and Red is _gone,_ never to tempt him again. He can give Beatrice back to her family and allow her siblings to tear him limb from limb.

When they arrive at Red’s door, all of them are filthy, exhausted, and teetering on the precipice of another mental breakdown. Wirt steps back to gesture at the glimmering ring floating like a soap bubble over the sodden ground. Its edges are thread-thin, a fleeting silver outline, a gossamer hoop through which all that can be seen is the indigo depth of the swamp. Beatrice frowns, not comprehending. Red bursts into tears at a scene only she can see. “I don’t believe it,” she weeps. “I th-thought… I thought I was going to be tr-trapped here f-f-forever, oh my _god,_ we made it…”

She manages to step within a foot of the portal before Wirt attacks. He rushes forward with spears of Edelwood, soundless as a striking owl. The first root misses Red. The second hooks around her ankle and there’s a terrible meaty crack as her own panicked momentum wrenches the joint the wrong way. She throws her head back in a shocked scream, falling, and _this_ is it, _this_ is when Wirt will reap that divine delectable soul—

Beatrice lunges at his back and wraps her arms around his throat. Squeezes until The Beast’s triumphant roar is crushed into a rasping shriek. And she does not release him until his vision blurs at the edges and it feels as if his eyes will bleed from the buildup of pressure and he sinks to his knees, scratching savagely at any part of Beatrice he can reach, until finally the monster coughs up the last vestige of air in his lungs and faints. 

Red pulls free from the Edelwood, snot-sobbing. She stumbles through her door and disappears. When there’s no question that the other girl is gone, Beatrice hides her face between Wirt’s unmoving shoulder blades, because unfortunately she’s snot-sobbing, too.


	6. 🙞In Darkness🙜

Wirt expects to be afraid of traveling back to the mill. Instead, he is disturbingly, uncannily numb. 

Beatrice’s stag happily chauffeurs Beatrice now that Wirt isn’t slobbering like a rabid hyena. It watches over Beatrice while she sleeps, only a few fitful hours at a time, and brings her edible flora from the marsh since Wirt doubts his friend wants anything to do with him. She eats very little and only speaks to The Beast to tell him that she’s ready to travel, or ready to rest. The shadows under her red-raw eyes are only a shade lighter than Wirt’s. Her dress is torn and dirty from the trip through the swamp… and from the slash of Wirt’s own claws. 

He should want to vomit from the fear of having to explain those few tattered rips. But there’s nothing in his stomach, not even shame. Most likely because Wirt believes that he is already as good as dead.

Four days to hike out of the swamp. Three more to see that familiar river, the slowly turning water wheel, the comfortable house amidst its sea of flowers. Beatrice has sent a letter to her loved ones every day to assure them that she’s alive, so it’s to no one’s surprise when all her kin rush out the front door or from their afternoon chores to gather her off her faithful buck. 

The unspeakable anger blazing from Ma’am and Sir should have Wirt groveling at their feet. But he faces their fury with detachment, watching his hopes burn to a crisp and doing nothing to rescue them from the fire. 

Pre-Beast Wirt would not have even stepped onto the blossom-lined front path. He would have hidden in the woods and observed from a safe distance as Beatrice was welcomed with flowing tears and heartbroken scolding, sentencing himself to forever orbit the mill to keep his friend healthy and severing all ties with the people who had so warmly brought him in. Wirt has committed an unforgivable sin. He stole Beatrice away and betrayed Sir, Ma’am, and all of Beatrice’s brothers and sisters. He is the worst of his impulses. The scum of the Unknown. No one would miss him if they never saw him again.

Yet Wirt trails just behind Beatrice, awaiting judgement, soaking in a hurricane’s worth of resentment and letting that immolating tide char his bones. He doesn’t know how to free Beatrice from what chains her to him. He won’t regret guiding Red home, as disastrous and traumatizing as that journey had been. This is all part of the crown he’s inherited… it was never supposed to be happily-ever-after. 

“Explain yourself,” commands Sir. The rigidly controlled levelness of his voice throws his righteous ire into sharp relief. Ma’am cannot even address Wirt; she ushers Beatrice inside, blotting her eyes between verbally flaying her unresponsive daughter. The rest of the bluebird brood has been banished indoors as well, so Wirt stands before Sir alone. 

Wirt’s eyes radiate dark, dark blue. His antlers have never felt heavier. “Someone needed help. I had to take Beatrice.” 

“Had to?” Sir struggles to mold his questions into comprehensible words below a shout, face purple, hands on his hips as he glares through Wirt’s being. Eventually, he’s able to grate out a hard, conflicted mutter. “I have to punish you, boy.” 

Wirt nods. Hollow. “I know.”

It’s obvious that Sir rarely hits his sons… has probably not hit any of them in years, if ever. His heart is not in it. The switch doesn’t fall across Wirt’s back hard enough to break the skin, and although Sir promised ten lashes, he stops at five, and orders Wirt to tuck his shirt in for dinner. 

As soon as Wirt glances through the window to notice Beatrice is absent from the dinner table, he meekly takes his own plate of food to eat behind the house, overlooking one of the grain fields to watch the sun splash up its vivid wave's crest of ruby red and neon pink. He wonders if the reason he’s deprived of any sensation is due to the extremes of his actions canceling one another out… he and Beatrice brought Red home, but only after Wirt repeatedly attempted to devour the lost stranger. He brought Beatrice home as well, but in worse shape than she left in. He’s been justly punished by Sir—actually, he rescinds that. It doesn’t count as punishment if Wirt only receives half of what he’s due, and still gets his share of supper. 

“ _Thy soul shall find itself alone…_ ” It sounds like a recording of his own syllables. Not Wirty truly speaking. How many times had his throat conjured the husky timbre of The Beast? “ _Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone..._ ”

A new soul explodes into the Unknown like a comet landing. The volcanic eruption of otherworldly energy ignites not a mile from the mill and Wirt jumps into the air as if he heard a bomb go off—dropping his dinner plate into some irises. His heart hammers uncontrollably. “No,” he practically sobs. “I _just_ brought somebody out of here, not again, _please_...”

It's a poor, insulting comparison, but the native souls of the Unknown are like batteries. Red’s soul had been a generator. 

This soul that blasts Wirt now is _the sun._

He stumbles and breaks into a full sprint because he has no choice. Wirt _must_ go, _must_ see who it is that has trespassed into his domain so awfully soon after the last infiltrator was banished. After a few strides he dives into the waving stalks of wheat and hones in on the soul like a shark—

Wirt breaches to clutch a small body in his gnarled talons, lips peeled back to reveal his teeth. “I̲̎'̪̌ṁ̱ ͈̐s̜͑o̙͂ř͙r͉͑ỹ̭,” he moans helplessly, hungrily to the child. “I̥͆ ̰͌d͉̆o̯̚n̜̐'̹̂t̼͛ ̦̋w̨̋a̲̒n͈̽t̢͌ ͖̕t͎̓o̫̅ ̡̂h̠͝u̻̒r̮͋ť͎ ͈̆ẏ̜ou, I don’t…”

He recognizes that face, those clothes, that smell of home. Everything inside of him breaks. 

“Greg,” The Beast wails. “What are you doing here?”

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus Tracks: "42" by Coldplay; "Putting The Dog To Sleep" by The Antlers; "Red Earth & Pouring Rain" by Bear's Den; "The Last Time" by The Script
> 
> Whiggity suggested "Red Earth" for me to listen to. If not for the friends I find online, I'd listen exclusively to lofi/chillhop and the dubstep playlists I made ten years ago. I am not Hip.
> 
> [Drew this scene](https://imgur.com/gallery/0rYHPq0) from the last installment. You win my undying affection if you can guess who's who! People on Imgur hate it, it's great. (You also win a prize for guessing what poem that is that Wirt quotes at the end. The prize is also my affection)
> 
> Would you believe that Greg was supposed to show up before spring like, three parts ago? Amazing where flying by the seat of your pants will take you. Anyway, here he is at last - the Sunshine Boy.
> 
> To everyone who stops by to read and doesn't leave me hate mail: thank you. To everyone who leaves a little kudos or a friendly comment: your positivity and support continues to sustain me. I appreciate all of you very much!


End file.
